IPv6 Mandates: Choosing a Transition Strategy, Preparing Transition Plans, and Executing the Migration of a Network to IPv6

Chapter 13. Using Pilot Programs to Facilitate Your IPv6 Transition

	Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.
	--Wernher von Braun

I'm a big fan of learning by doing. You can read all of the books on a topic, but until you actually attempt to do what you've read about, you really can't grasp the details enough to consider yourself knowledgeable. When it comes to technologically leading-edge topics like an IPv6 transition, organizations need to learn new things, sometimes things that nobody has tried before. I believe that the best way possible to learn those new things is by going out and trying to do them.

What You'll Learn

This chapter describes pilot projects, a form of research used to vet capabilities for your enterprise before committing to full-scale deployment of those capabilities. You'll learn to identify what is required to set up and execute a successful pilot, including setting up the pilot's goals appropriately to its scale and the number of resources that can be allocated to it. You'll learn what you need to measure (and sometimes not measure) in a pilot project and you'll learn to prepare for the pilot's failure. Given that it is a research project, a pilot can fail, and you need to be prepared to handle that case.

After learning about pilots in general, the chapter drills down on software pilots and their particular idiosyncrasies, concluding by relating the story of a real-life software pilot that applied the principles this chapter recommends. ...